Sapphire & Steel ★★★★☆
Love this weird, slow, bullshit. Love thinking about how they are non human entities taking on human roles and human gender as part of the process of their mission.
Dungeon Meshi ★★★★☆
I was very slow to warm up to this but I have now watched the entire thing through twice. Love these autistic weirdos.
Sonic Prime s3 ★☆☆☆☆
Netflix love to make cartoons where nothing happens other than in the first and last episodes of a set.
Gushing Over Magical Girls ☆☆☆☆☆
I heard some positive things about this in how it uses hentai tropes to show characters learning and embracing their kinks but oh fuck these are just kids. There is one kid who is so young the other kids talk about how much of a kid she is.
Avatar: The Last Airbender (live action) ★★☆☆☆
I was prepared to hate this. I did hate the first episode! But on the second episode we are met with a relationship between Suki and Sokka that is actually much improved and as it goes on how it weaves multiple episodes of the original into single large storylines actually works really well. The way they handled the black and white part of the finale also stood out as gorgeous. Not as good as the original show by any means but certainly not the trainwreck people claim it is.
X-Men ’97 ★★★☆☆
I watched the original cartoon a good bit as a child though my memories are pretty vague. I guess I’m probably the target audience for this? And I did enjoy it quite a bit. It does feel liek it is stuck in a middleground between trying to be an episodic throwback and a modern more serialised show also doing—what I have gathered from other people talking about it—a greatest hits of X-Men comics from when the original show ended till now. The end result feels like it’s constantly jumping from one big season finale type plot to another. Everything is really big and the world is constantly ending with little room in between for other stuff, except for the story of Jubilee being trapped in a game I guess.
Star Trek Discovery s5 ★☆☆☆☆
It really feels like everyone was phoning it in at this point.
Knuckles ★★☆☆☆
Surprisingly decent? About of a level and style with the Paramount Sonic movies which makes sense. It’s mostly about bowling? Also Knuckles is declared to be basically Jewish. It’s a weird one. I did love the absurdity of the puppet show episode featuring Iblis from Sonic 06 for some reason.
Inside No. 9 s9 ★★★☆☆
As usual for this show the series is a mixed bag, though none of them outright bad this time which is nice. Highlights for me were definitely Boo to a Goose and Mulberry Close. For the latter I do love silly diegetic/found footage type setups. Having the entire thing be footage from a doorbell camera was fun.
Doctor Who ★★★★★
Dr who is back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (wolf Howl)
I liked every episode of this series more than the previous one up until Rogue and I did not dislike Space Babies, which honestly made me cry at one point. The Devil’s Chord is a fun and Davies’ willingness to play with fantasy and the fourth wall more is great, though the ending is a bit of a copout (more on endings in a minute). Boom is Moffat playing some of his own greatest hits with a bottle episode (that apparently still cost a fortune lmao).
73 Yards to continue dialing up the weirdness and more fantasy direction the show is more comfortable to explore now and is a great showcase of Millie Gibson on apparently her first day on the job??? Dot and Bubble has no fucking right to be as good as it was for an episode about kids being on they dang phone and people being racist to the Doctor. And then... the rest were really great fun to varying degrees.
I think endings are a bit of a weakness, both within individual episodes and with the overall series. Davies is trying to take inspiration from Moffat’s tightly wound puzzles that reveal themselves in a single moment but he is just not as good at it. Even Moffat’s own episode is a bit shakier on how things come together than a lot of his older work, trying himself maybe to include more of Davies’ habits of the power of love saving the day.
But wow, it’s lovely to be able to love new Doctor Who again.
Tales of the TARDIS: Pyramids of Mars ★★★☆☆
I have seem a few of the pre-2005 serials but not this one. This was a pretty enjoyable way to watch it at least. It didn’t feel like anything was really missing even though I am given to understand that there is a good bit cut from the start and end in particular. Sarah Jane also rules, actually. I can see why people love her. The Doctor just calling the Egyptian stuff cultural approriation is funny as well. On the basic level it’s obviously just calling out the history of the show a bit but as a friend pointed out taken from an in-universe perspective it implies that the Osirans stole the ancient Egyptian shtick from Egypt and not the other way around like that joke from Futurama.
My Adventures with Superman s2 ★★★☆☆
Like the first series of the show and X-Men ’97 this feels like it’s stuck between episodic and serialised without enough episodes to make it work, though I think it suffers less from that than those two did. Cara is cute, Michael Emerson was great as Brainiac and god sometimes I just love the episode names in this show. The Machine Who Would Be Empire is nearly up there with You Will Believe A Man Can Lie.
Trigun ★★★☆☆
I enjoyed this but didn’t really love it. Meryl and Millie feel very wasted. Both in terms of just Millie is great but also the bit of them working for an insurance company following this walking disaster zone could have been really fun but they mostly end up being people who travel with Vash and do nothing. And I didn’t particularly like when it shifted into serious plot mode in the second half and also they clearly ran out of money for animating it.
Also Vash occasionally being a creep sucked.
Alos also where does the salmon for the salmon sandwiches come from?
Invincible ★★★☆☆
The first series was definitely stronger than the second. The second felt like it was going in several directions and didn’t really follow through fully on them. Omniman’s turn around also feels really really sudden compared to how he was in the first series. The Atom Eve special was also just gorgeously animated, though it feels like with all this being added to her backstory there should have been more depth to her in the main show, especially with her relationship to her parents.
Douglas Is Cancelled ★★★★☆
I was told repeatedly that if you struggle to get through the first two episodes it is worth it for the second half and annoyingly that is correct. The name and the first episode of this show are a trap for culture war idiots. I don’t know how good of an idea that is or how much it is going to convince anyone of anything, but the show does a full about-face and suddenly just fully changes genres in the second half to a cutting and tense as fuck confrontation with complicitly of the abuse of women. It’s so fucking good if you can get over the old man yells at cloud aspects of the first half.